Summer issue of Afterall out now
Issue 24
www.afterall.org
Essays: Photorealism and the world of work; flamenco and modernism; Flávio de Carvalho’s tropical designs; and architecture and support
Afterall is happy to announce the launch of issue 24 (summer 2010), which looks at the question of realism today and to alternative episodes in the history of modernism through a series of essays and artists profiles.
In the opening essay, Afterall co-editor Dieter Roelstraete considers Photorealist painting made in the United States during the 1960s and 70s, relating the artists’ depiction of labour with a shift, occurring at the same time, to an economy of immaterial labour. This discussion of realism and representation is further explored in the work of three different artists: Alice Creischer, Pedro Costa and Kerry James Marshall.
Maria Muhle considers Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann and Christian von Borries’s use of performed – rather than filmed or photographed – re-enactment as a means of critiquing history, with a view to examining art’s ability to address the cultural and political field of which it is part. This question is also addressed by Ellen Blumenstein, who, through the prism of Alain Badiou’s philosophy and regarding three major works of Alice Creischer, speculates on the possibility of politics within art practice.
The political implications of Pedro Costa‘s unflinching films, which have addressed the slums of Lisbon and the workers on the Cape Verde Islands, are explored by Jean-Louis Comolli, particularly in regards to Costa’s treatment of the film frame. Setting Costa’s work against the historical categories of realism in film, Volker Pantenburg analyses the evolution of his modes of production to identify a form of digital realism within his work.
Kobena Mercer looks at Kerry James Marshall‘s paintings against a backdrop of Afro-Modernism, with its negotiations of historical and contemporary contradictions; and Terry R. Myers examines the artist’s move from painting to installation, questioning what it means to call an artist a painter.
Alternative modern traditions are the focus of two essays by Doris von Drathen and Afterall co-editor Nuria Enguita Mayo on the work of Leonor Antunes. Through a discussion of her historical references and the techniques of duplication and measurement she employs in her sculptural practice, the essays reflect on the utopian legacy of architectural modernism.
From a contrasting historical perspective, Pedro G. Romero questions the intersections between flamenco, Situationism and modernism, exploring flamenco as a contradictory form – both neo-primitive and modern, Spanish and gypsy, fixed and improvisational.
Finally, Inti Guerrero looks at the work of Brazilian architect Flávio del Carvalho and his designs for the modern man of the tropics, and Céline Condorelli speaks about the notion of support with Mark Cousins, the architectural theorist and founder of Architecture Association in London.
Issue 24 can be purchased in bookshops across the UK, Europe and America. For more information on Afterall or to subscribe, visit our website: www.afterall.org.
Afterall Online publishes new content, exclusive to our website, twice a month. Recent posts include a review of the talks and performance programme Home Works V in Beirut and a conversation with artist Andrea Büttner.
Afterall Books‘ latest titles are Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking by Dieter Roelstraete and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés by Julian Jason Haladyn. For more information on the One Work series please visit www.afterall.org/books/one.work
Afterall journal is published by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, in editorial and research partnership with M HKA, Antwerp and UNIA arteypensamiento, Seville, and in association with the University of Chicago Press.
